2 – User-gen’d

Week 2 – Global users generating media for social change

Work Plan

This week we will explore the explosion of “user-generated” (a contested descriptor) world-wide online media being collected and organized by two human rights and advocacy organizations: WITNESS and ENGAGE MEDIA.  How are advocates and citizen (or sometimes professional) journalists using these emerging communications tools to draw attention to a burning issue (or under-reported one), to bring in new participants, to affect policy, to bear witness and to help ignite social change? What is happening when human rights activists document, co-create, curate and distribute visual evidence together, with others, or, perhaps anonymously “finding” it in the world?

Reading Assignment

Gere, Charlie (2008).  Digital Culture.  London: Reaktion Books.  pp. 7 – 78.

Term Project:  Week 2 Benchmarks

  • Define team roles & responsibilities
  • Agree on theme and scope for project
  • Outline weekly production and public engagement workplan
  • Choose creation platform and sketch out draft design wireframe

Online Assignment: website immersion + viewing

WITNESS and The Human Rights Channel collaboration

Watch this TedX talk on Youtube : “Witness Your Environment,” by Kelly Matheson, who puts into a larger human rights frame the diverse campaign and media work that WITNESS is doing. 18 minutes.

Go to the WITNESS home page for background on the organization. Please read about, and take a personal tour of the WITNESS site.

Return to the WITNESS Human Rights Channel (on YouTube).  Scroll down the list and choose at least two different human rights video playlists to view several clips from each cluster.  When you click on a playlist cluster, on the RIGHT SIDE column you can read background context on the posted video clips. Try to watch at least 30 minutes of video.

Engage Media: Social Justice and Environmental Video from Asia Pacific
http://www.engagemedia.org/

Click the BROWSE button on the upper right side of the ENGAGE MEDIA website and choose at least two thematic areas to watch video clips from and become familiar with.  Engage Media could be a site from which you may curate your final course project. Try and watch at least 30 minutes of video, either several shorts or a full piece.

Online Discussion:

Here are some guiding questions to choose from in structuring your public post and commentary responses to others’ posts:

  • What do you observe while exploring the full context of these sites? (And can you conceptually link the cases studies to your readings thus far?)
  • What are 1 – 3 unresolved issues you can identify in one or more examples from the sites?
  • Where are the strengths and successes in these projects?
  • What insight can you share about your examples?
  • Does this work trigger further questions for you…for example?

Public post + comment is due before Friday, 5pm.

FOR EASE OF READING, RECORDING + RETRIEVING, PLEASE TITLE EACH WEEKLY POST IN THIS WAY:

WEEK #: [Your Name]

AND…

PLEASE REMEMBER TO TAG ALL YOUR PUBLIC POSTS with a subject tag.

Private Post-Essay: Focus on this week’s reading

In considering a conceptual exegesis of your weekly readings,  I offer these structuring guidelines to focus your essays:

  • Objective: Summarize the key points of the author’s argument in this section of the book. What main concepts stand out for you? Explain.
  • Reflective: What surprises you about this reading?  What personal associations does it trigger?  Where did you struggle with it?
  • Interpretive: What important evidence in the reading can you find that proves the argument, advances a new way of thinking or refutes previous assumptions? What is the author’s analysis of the importance, salience and significance of the subject in this section?
  • New directions: Are there questions the book brings up so far? What are the implications of the author’s argument? What is your insight from this reading?

PLEASE TITLE EACH WEEKLY PRIVATE POST-ESSAY IN THIS WAY:

WEEK # PRIVATE: [YOUR NAME]

This private 500 word min. post-essay is due to me by Sunday, midnight.

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